What you are looking at is called internet time, which is measured in 'beats', a way of measuring time made for the internet age. Just imagine: no "half-past"s or "quarter-to"s, AMs or PMs, or timezones. That's right: no timezones. How does it work? Below is an interactive map of the world showing how.
Each day divided is into 1000 parts, called beats (or in some circles, millidays). Internet time is consistent across the world, resetting to @000 at midnight UTC+1.
A long-standing fascination of dividing things by ten was finally applied to time in 1754 CE, leading to the short-lived adoption of decimal time during the French revolution, in which the day was divided into ten hours, and each hour into 100 minutes.
This grand tradition was renewed by the watch company Swatch, who marketed a 'Swatch Internet Time', where the day is divided into 1000 .beats.
You're smart, you're online -- of course you want to use it! If you're a programmer who wants to bring internet time to their software, I've prepared a selection of open source implementations of internet time in many different programming languages below.
| Name | Language | Important Notes |
|---|---|---|
| dot-beat-time | JavaScript | 0.3kb, fast, modern, zero dependencies, mine, used on this page! |
| use-internet-time | JavaScript | 0.4kb React hook wrapping dot-beat-time |
| beats | Rust | |
| dotbeat | JavaScript | |
| beattime | JavaScript | |
| swatch | JavaScript | |
| beat_time | Elixir | |
| beat | Python | |
| beats | Go |
Know a good implementation that's not shown here? Get in touch!
Internet time enthusiast? Feel free to link to this page!